In the end this book rests on the venerable idea
that moral good and moral harm are very real
things, and moral good or moral harm can come to
a society by what it esteems and by what it
disdains.

Many people have been persuaded to take a benign
view of the Clinton presidency on the basis of
arguments that have attained an almost talismanic
stature but that in my judgment are deeply wrong
and deeply pernicious. We need to say no to those
arguments as loudly as we can -- and yes to the
American ideals they endanger.
-William J. Bennett,
The
Death of Outrage

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the
pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.
-John Updike

Well, it took nine long years of watching him wallow in moral degradation,
political expedience, and self pity but at long last, I actually feel sorry
for Bill Clinton. I'm not generally big on the idea of entrapment
as a defense, but if ever anyone has been justified in using it, Bill Clinton
is over this whole
pardon debacle. After all, for nearly a decade now Hillary Clinton,
campaign and White House staffers, the Democratic Party, editorial page
writers, feminists, civil rights groups, moderate Republicans, liberal
attorneys, academics, historians, and journalists
have assured us, and him, that as long as Bill Clinton cared deeply, worked
hard, and acknowledged that he isn't a moral paragon, then no personal
crime should be held against him. Among the crimes that we have excused
were adultery, sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, sodomy, perjury,
obstruction of justice, invasion of privacy, treason, etc., etc., etc.,
ad nauseum.

As long as the Dow stayed high, it seemed like there was nothing that
Clinton could do which would draw so much as a stern rebuke from the institutional
Left in this country. Oh sure, Joe Lieberman famously expressed some
mild disappointment over the whole Monica mess, but it was really just
the sort of solemn head wagging speech your Dad used to give you as an
alternative to a spanking, and then Joe of course voted in lock step with
the rest of his Party to exonerate the big lug. Not a single member
of Bill Clinton's Cabinet or staff ever resigned to protest his behavior;
not a single member of his Party ever called on him to resign or even suggested
that his offenses should be punished. At the end of the Impeachment
process, Bill Clinton was left standing tall and the people who sought
to hold him to account--Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, the House
managers, etc.--were widely portrayed in the press as a collection of obsessive
weirdos. You can almost excuse the guy for feeling like he was bulletproof.

So then what happens ? He's out of office for one month and what's
everybody upset about ? What is the offense that finally gets even his
wife and his former employees upset ? What could possibly be so awful
that even lap dog columnists like Al Hunt, Eleanor Clift, Richard
Cohen and Jake Tapper are offended ? What indiscretion is so
monumental that it actually leads James Carville to stop defending him
? The straw that broke the camel's back turns out to be a little
bit of simony.
That's right; after all that's gone before, the piffling little matter
of trading pardons for sexual favors and cash turns out to be the one thing
that the Left can not tolerate. To an impartial observer, this just
doesn't seem fair. It is far too late for Democrats to try to redeem
themselves by finally holding Bill Clinton responsible for something; they
lay down with this dog for a decade; it's no use expressing shock that
they've woken up with fleas. Bill Clinton is the victim of the worst
kind of hypocrisy. All those truly horrible things he did were just
fine with the Party, as long as he was President. Now he leaves office
and his own cohorts are going to nail him for selling pardons, a victimless
crime if ever there was one ? Where do they get off ?

This is the very situation that Bill Bennett tried to warn them, and
the rest of us, about when he wrote this little book at the height of the
Monica scandal :

[O]n Bill Clinton's behalf, in his defense, many
bad ideas are being put into widespread circulation.
It is said that private character has virtually
no impact on governing character; that what matters
above all is a healthy economy; that moral authority
is defined solely by how well a president deals
with public policy matters; that America needs to
become more European (read: more
"sophisticated") in its attitude toward sex; that
lies about sex, even under oath, don't really matter;
that we shouldn't be "judgmental"; that it is inappropriate
to make preliminary judgments about the
president's conduct because he hasn't been found
guilty in a court of law; and so forth.

If these arguments take root in American soil --
if they become the coin of the public realm -- we
will have validated them, and we will come to rue
the day we did. These arguments define us down;
they assume a lower common denominator of behavior
and leadership than we Americans ought to
accept. And if we do accept it, we will have committed
an unthinking act of moral and intellectual
disarmament. In the realm of American ideals and
the great tradition of public debate, the high
ground will have been lost. And when we need to
rely again on this high ground -- as surely we
will need to -- we will find it drained of its compelling
moral power. In that sense, then, the
arguments invoked by Bill Clinton and his defenders
represent an assault on American ideals, even
if you assume the president did nothing improper.
So the arguments need to be challenged.

I believe these arguments are also a threat to our
understanding of American self-government. It
demands active participation in, and finally, reasoned
judgments on, important civic matters.
"Judgment" is a word that is out of favor these
days, but it remains a cornerstone of democratic
self-government. It is what enables us to hold ourselves,
and our leaders, to high standards. It is
how we distinguish between right and wrong, noble
and base, honor and dishonor. We cannot
ignore that responsibility, or foist it on others.
It is the price -- sometimes the exacting price -- of
citizenship in a democracy. The most popular arguments
made by the president's supporters invite
us to abandon that participation, those standards,
and the practice of making those distinctions.

This is precisely what has happened. Having refused to judge Bill
Clinton for nine years, having refused others the right to judge him, Democrats
and their fellow travelers no longer have any moral standing on which to
rely when they seek to judge him now.

Bennett systematically annihilates every defense of the President for
those earlier offenses and brick by brick builds the case for why a healthy
society must not tolerate, and why it is destructive to the culture to
excuse, such behavior. His warning, which unfortunately went unheeded,
is now coming back to haunt those who have excused so much on Bill Clinton's
part that their current protestations inevitably ring hollow.

It is late February, 2001, as I write this. Despite a few outright
condemnations by former officials like Jimmy Carter and Hamilton
Jordan and some general noises of disgust from the rank and file, no
major elected Democrat has yet come forth to indict Bill Clinton and his
behavior. But I will predict that, within the next couple of weeks,
both Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, and probably John Kerry and Bob Kerrey,
will give major speeches in which they cut Bill loose and say that finally
he has gone too far. When that time comes, it will be
helpful to recall that following Clinton's impeachment by the House, Al
Gore referred to him as "one of our greatest Presidents," and that Lieberman,
Kerrey, and Kerry all voted to acquit. Given the opportunity to root
this cancer out of the Presidency and remove him from the body politic,
they all took a pass. It is useless for them to decry that fact that
the tumor metastasized. They and their fellow Democrats were accomplices
in Bill Clinton's "assault on American ideals" and, by their inaction,
presided over the "death of outrage." It may be possible to
revive the victim--let us hope so--but they are not the ones to do it;
they are too deeply implicated in Bill Clinton's reign of crime.